This week: Add Drama with Blue False Indigo
Hello!
It’s only the second week of May, yet Baptisia australis (Blue False Indigo) is blooming in my garden—easily two weeks early. Welcome to an early summer!
Typically, Baptisia blooms in late spring (May into June), with purple flowers lining tall upright stalks. Once the flowers fade, fleshy light green seed pods develop. Each pod is about as big as a peanut shell. As the seed ripens, the pod blackens.
The foliage is also gorgeous. It starts out bright green but fades into a silvery blue in the summer, casting a lovely backdrop for later-blooming plants like asters. While this plant doesn’t have a fall color, the foliage turns a deep gray to black color in the winter—a goth look! This plant is also self-cleaning if it is windy enough—mine became a tumbleweed that blew across my yard this past winter.
Baptisia grows large—at least three feet wide and tall, if not a little larger. This makes it a good replacement for native shrubs in small spaces and also a way to cover a lot of ground in the garden. In fact, it is such a lovely problem-solving plant that I find myself constantly recommending it.
Food Web Benefits
Its spring flowers feed bees, butterflies, moths, and beetles, and its seeds are eaten by songbirds. It is also a larval host for the Wild Indigo Dusky Wing Skipper, Orange Sulphur, Marin Blue, Hoary Edge, and Frosted Elfin butterflies. Even better, deer usually leave it alone.
Drawbacks
What possible disadvantages could there be for such a gorgeous plant? Well, Baptisia is slow to establish—it can take up to three seasons to bloom and up to five years to reach its full size. This is often why even small potted Baptisia plants come with a sizable price tag—to grow a sellable product, the nursery has to keep them for a few years.
It also has a tendency to flop when it has a bumper crop of seed pods. Removing most of the heavy seed pods will make the plant spring back up. But, you’ll sacrifice some bird food (or new plants) in the process.
A Final Fun Fact
Why is the plant called Blue False Indigo? Indigenous peoples used it to make blue dye, and the colonists picked up on this practice and named the plant after the indigo plant. The more you know!
Elsewhere:
Are plants smart? Do they have brains? Fresh Air interviewed the author of The Light Eaters about plant communication, responsiveness, and memory. Fascinating!
Have a good week,
Julie